almost hit 5k hands

my goal going into the weekend was to play 5k hands and i basically got there. i think the final tally was 4,774 hands or something like that which for me is an absolute ton. my goal of 5k was going to be 4 tabling friday nite, saturday aft and sunday aft but i never got to play friday nite at all. so when i sat down saturday for my session i decided to try 8 tabling. it actually went a lot better than i thought it would since anytime i've ever tried anything over 5 tables it's been tough.

while it helped me to put in a ton of hands i don't think 8 tabling is optimal for a player trying to learn the game. the only time i think it's a good idea really is when you're playing to make money rather than playing to improve, get better and move up limits. So after the dust settled i made a wopping $31 for my effort. the quest started off slow and i was down a couple buy-ins early but came back and finished saturday up 3 buy-ins. then on sunday a hit a few more tough spots and ended up losing back over 2 buy-ins.

i also got out to play live on saturday night and after waiting 3 hours sat down for some 1/2nl w/ a $100 cap buy-in. they've actually started introducing 1/2 tables w/ a $200 cap so i think i'll play those from now on since the 2/5nl game has a $300 cap. the games made me happy to realize that there is still a ton of money to be made in poker. in the two tables i sat at i did not see one player that was good. not saying im great but if it weren't for my raises every pot would have been 7 ways limped. i ended up losing $30 after dicking around a bit at the end of the session and once c-betting what i thought was a heads up pot but not seeing a third guy had limp/called my raise and shoved the flop so that cost me. can't wait to play in vegas but i'll definitly have to be more disciplined than i am when playing live close to home.

anyways, here are all the hands that i got stacked with during the course of the weekend. some are just plain ugly play but i'll explain my thoughts.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082883 - villain just sat down and is complete unknown, against a good player i can get away from this but i have a hard time folding w/o a read. maybe i should be folding to unknowns too.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082882 - villain was very bad maniac and has a huge opening range and his flop min-raise is so wide that i'm never folding to him. i only call the raise cuz if i shove he might find a fold but will almost certainly shove the turn thinking he has fold equity.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082881 - i get stacked again w/ an overpair to an unknown villain on a super bad flop for my hand.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082879 - ugghh, embarassing. i didn't have any pahud stats on villain yet but he's been aggressive and has 3-bet my raises a couple times already. i decide to call light in position this time and get married to top pair. the thing that made me call down was that he was timing down every street before making his bet which i thought was weak. oh well. he ended up being a very snug player and i think every move i saw him make early was a legit hand.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082877 - this one is pretty standard.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082875 - a beat to spice things up.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082874 - this one sucked. villain is playing 70/30ish over a good enough sample and i snap called. i think this is a very borderline ev call and im not sold on folding or calling either way.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2082873 - this hand me sick to my stomach. villain is playing 13/9 over a large sample and is on two or three of my other tables. i've not seen him get out of line once and when he put the small 4-bet in i was 90% sure he had Aces but went with it anyways. i went through the math and it looks like he would need to be showing up w/ QQ a small % of the time and AK a decent % of the time to make it worth calling. i've never been one to agree to folding KK pre but this hand might make me a believer.

tg